Chapter 38 Further Reading

Essential Reports and Primary Sources

Bank for International Settlements. "BIS Annual Economic Report 2023: Chapter III — Blueprint for the Future Monetary System." BIS, 2023.

The BIS — the central bank of central banks — provides the most authoritative overview of the CBDC landscape and the broader vision for a future monetary system that integrates CBDCs, tokenized deposits, and new payment infrastructures. Chapter III of the 2023 annual report articulates the BIS's vision of a "unified ledger" that combines CBDCs, tokenized bank deposits, and tokenized assets on shared infrastructure. This is the technocratic establishment's most ambitious statement about where digital money is heading. Essential reading for understanding the institutional perspective. Available free at bis.org.

Bank for International Settlements. "CBDCs in Emerging Market Economies." BIS Papers No. 123, 2022.

This paper specifically addresses the CBDC landscape in emerging markets — where financial inclusion needs are greatest and institutional challenges are most severe. It covers case studies from the Bahamas, Nigeria, Ghana, and multiple Asian economies. Particularly valuable for its analysis of how CBDC motivations differ between advanced and developing economies. Available free at bis.org.

European Central Bank. "A Stocktake on the Digital Euro." ECB, 2023; "Progress on the Investigation Phase of a Digital Euro." ECB, 2023.

The ECB's official publications on the digital euro project provide the most detailed publicly available information about Europe's approach to CBDC design. The privacy framework, holding limit proposals, offline payment architecture, and legal framework are all documented here. Read these to understand how a CBDC project is designed by committee in a democratic, multi-country context — a very different process from China's centralized approach. Available free at ecb.europa.eu.

People's Bank of China. "Progress of Research & Development of E-CNY in China." PBOC, 2021.

The PBOC's official white paper on the digital yuan, released in 2021, remains the most comprehensive official statement of the e-CNY's design philosophy, technical architecture, and policy goals. It is, inevitably, a document of advocacy rather than analysis — it presents the e-CNY in the most favorable possible light — but it is essential for understanding what the PBOC says it is doing and why. The concept of "controllable anonymity" is defined here. Available in English translation through the PBOC website.

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. "Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation." Federal Reserve, 2022.

The Fed's discussion paper on CBDC — not a proposal to issue one, but an exploration of the issues. This document is notable for its caution: it identifies benefits and risks with equal weight and explicitly states that the Fed "does not intend to proceed with issuance of a CBDC without clear support from the executive branch and from Congress." Read this to understand why the US has moved so slowly on CBDC relative to China and Europe. Available free at federalreserve.gov.

Books

Brunnermeier, Markus K., and Jean-Pierre Landau. The Digital Euro and the Future of Money. Princeton University Press, forthcoming/2025.

Brunnermeier (Princeton) and Landau (Sciences Po, former Deputy Governor of the Banque de France) provide the most rigorous academic analysis of the digital euro and its implications for monetary theory, banking stability, and the international monetary system. The book's treatment of bank disintermediation is the most thorough in the academic literature. Essential for readers who want to go beyond policy briefs to the underlying economic theory.

Rogoff, Kenneth. The Curse of Cash. Princeton University Press, 2016.

Written before the CBDC era but eerily prescient, Rogoff argues that large-denomination cash ($100 bills, 500-euro notes) serves primarily to facilitate tax evasion, crime, and corruption, and that phasing out physical cash would improve economic management and reduce illicit activity. Rogoff's argument provides the intellectual foundation for one of the most controversial CBDC motivations: using digital currency to replace cash and gain monetary policy flexibility (including negative interest rates). Read this alongside Chapter 4's discussion of money and monetary policy. A brilliant and controversial book that challenges assumptions about cash as a civil liberty.

Auer, Raphael, Jon Frost, and Hyun Song Shin. "Why Do People Use CBDCs?" BIS Working Papers No. 1126, 2023.

A rigorous empirical analysis of CBDC adoption patterns in countries that have launched retail CBDCs, including the Bahamas and Nigeria. The paper examines who uses CBDCs, for what purposes, and why adoption has lagged projections in every launched CBDC. The finding that adoption is driven primarily by government incentives rather than organic demand is supported by granular transaction data. Essential reading for anyone evaluating CBDC adoption claims.

Eswar Prasad. The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021.

Prasad (Cornell, former head of the IMF's China division) provides a comprehensive overview of how digital technologies — cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, CBDCs, and fintech — are transforming the global monetary system. His treatment of the digital yuan is particularly strong, informed by decades of expertise on the Chinese economy. The book is balanced, accessible, and well-sourced — an excellent entry point for readers who want broader context than this chapter alone provides.

Academic Papers and Policy Analysis

Auer, Raphael, and Rainer Bohme. "The Technology of Retail Central Bank Digital Currency." BIS Quarterly Review, March 2020.

A foundational paper that establishes the taxonomy of CBDC design choices: account-based vs. token-based, direct vs. intermediated, DLT vs. conventional infrastructure. This paper provides the analytical framework that most subsequent CBDC analysis builds upon. Short, clear, and enormously influential. Available free at bis.org.

Bindseil, Ulrich. "Tiered CBDC and the Financial System." ECB Working Paper No. 2351, 2020.

Bindseil (Director General of Market Infrastructure and Payments at the ECB) provides the most detailed analysis of the bank disintermediation problem and the holding limit as a solution. The paper models different CBDC designs and their impact on bank deposits, lending, and monetary transmission. This is the paper that convinced the ECB to propose a holding limit. Technical but accessible to readers with intermediate economics knowledge.

Adrian, Tobias, and Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli. "The Rise of Digital Money." IMF Fintech Note 19/01, 2019.

An early but influential IMF paper that categorized digital money into five types (central bank money, commercial bank money, e-money, b-money [backed by securities], and crypto) and analyzed the competitive dynamics between them. Published before most CBDC projects were announced, it nonetheless anticipated many of the tensions this chapter discusses. Available free at imf.org.

Kiff, John, et al. "A Survey of Research on Retail Central Bank Digital Currency." IMF Working Paper No. 20/104, 2020.

A comprehensive survey of the academic and policy literature on retail CBDCs as of 2020, covering motivations, design, monetary policy implications, financial stability risks, and cross-border considerations. A useful starting point for students who want to explore the academic literature on CBDCs more broadly.

Surveillance and Privacy

Allen, Sarah, et al. "Design Choices for Central Bank Digital Currency: Policy and Technical Considerations." NBER Working Paper No. 27634, 2020.

A collaboration between economists and computer scientists (including contributors from the MIT Digital Currency Initiative) that analyzes the tradeoffs between privacy, compliance, and implementation in CBDC design. The paper is notable for its explicit treatment of privacy as a design variable rather than an afterthought. It demonstrates that privacy-preserving CBDC designs are technically feasible but require deliberate architectural choices.

Agur, Itai, Anil Ari, and Giovanni Dell'Ariccia. "Designing Central Bank Digital Currencies." Journal of Monetary Economics, vol. 125, 2022.

A formal economic model of optimal CBDC design that explicitly incorporates the tradeoff between financial inclusion (maximized by making CBDC widely accessible) and bank disintermediation (minimized by limiting CBDC's attractiveness). The model provides a theoretical foundation for the holding limits and interest rate decisions that central banks are grappling with.

Cypherpunk perspectives: Chaum, David, Christian Grothoff, and Thomas Moser. "How to Issue a Central Bank Digital Currency." SNB Working Paper 3/2021, 2021.

David Chaum — the inventor of digital cash in the 1980s and one of the intellectual founders of the cypherpunk movement — collaborated with a Swiss National Bank researcher to propose a privacy-preserving CBDC design based on blind signatures. The paper is remarkable because Chaum's lifelong work has been about ensuring that digital payments can be private from governments, and here he is designing a government digital currency with that same goal. The proposed design uses cryptographic techniques to enable anonymous small transactions while maintaining auditability for large ones. A bridge document between the cypherpunk and central banking traditions.

Data Sources and Trackers

Atlantic Council CBDC Tracker — atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker

The most comprehensive publicly available tracker of global CBDC projects, updated monthly. Covers over 130 countries, categorizing projects as launched, pilot, development, research, inactive, or cancelled. Interactive map with country-by-country details on design choices, timelines, and motivations. Essential for staying current on a rapidly evolving landscape.

BIS Innovation Hub — bisih.org

The BIS Innovation Hub conducts and publishes results from cross-border CBDC experiments, including Project mBridge (multi-currency cross-border settlement), Project Dunbar (multi-CBDC platform), Project Icebreaker (cross-border retail), and Project Helvetia (wholesale DLT settlement). The Hub's publications provide the most authoritative data on cross-border CBDC interoperability — one of the most technically challenging and geopolitically significant aspects of the CBDC landscape.

Central Bank Digital Currency Information Database (CBDC.info) — cbdc.info

An academic database maintained by researchers that catalogs CBDC-related publications, speeches, and policy documents from central banks worldwide. Useful for research projects that require comprehensive primary source coverage.

Contrarian and Critical Perspectives

Selgin, George. "Central Bank Digital Currency as a Potential Source of Financial Instability." Cato Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 2021.

Selgin (Cato Institute) provides a libertarian-leaning critique of CBDCs, arguing that the bank disintermediation risk is more severe than proponents acknowledge and that CBDCs create new channels for government control over personal finances. The paper is valuable as a well-argued counterpoint to the BIS/ECB/IMF perspective that dominates the institutional literature.

Tobin, James. "The Case for Preserving Regulatory Distinctions." Proceedings of the Economic Policy Symposium, Jackson Hole, 1987.

Long before CBDCs, the Nobel laureate economist James Tobin proposed "deposited currency accounts" — public accounts at the Federal Reserve available to all citizens. Tobin's proposal anticipated many CBDC design questions by decades. Reading Tobin is a reminder that the idea of public digital money did not originate in the cryptocurrency era — and that the objections to it have been rehearsed for just as long.